Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/climate/pfas-fertilizer-sludge-farm.html

by yasp • 2 years ago

36 44 2 years ago

mitchbob• 2 years ago

razodactyl• 2 years ago

I remember being the "general public" unaware of PFAS. Anything "non-stick" contains it, you realise that it's everywhere in modern society.

Blissful ignorance was nice while it lasted.

gessha3• 2 years ago

Significant other was studying removal methods for those chemicals and as soon as I learned enough about them, I threw all of my non-stick pans away.

Learning to coat steel pans in oil to make them non-stick-ish has been a great help.

nlehuen2• 2 years ago

Learning to coat steel pans in oil to make them non-stick-ish has been a great help.

Doesn't this involve cooking oil into harmful polymers?

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

Eggs over-easy on steel all-clad are the bane of my existence on some mornings.

more_corn• 2 years ago

They’re also in your furniture, your takeout containers, your paper cups, paper straws, fire retardant fabrics (required for all children’s sleepwear!)

Teknomancer2• 2 years ago

Two helping words: Cast Iron.

janice19993• 2 years ago

It was intentional ignorance. 3M and DuPont knew these chemicals were in human blood samples for decades.

"How 3M Discovered, Then Concealed, the Dangers of Forever Chemicals"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/27/3m-forever-che...

NFVLCP2• 2 years ago

Totally. Same for Monsonto and their glyphosate.

"Merchants of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide" https://foe.org/resources/merchants-of-poison/

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

What I'd worry about is not PFAs, but excreted drugs. Some drugs (or their byproducts) are persistent, and have been deliberately selected to have biological effects.

I take metformin. This drug is mostly excreted in feces. The dry mass of feces might be 1% metformin for someone taking typical doses. The drug does break down in the environment, but only slowly.

janice19993• 2 years ago

This is already a known issue and waste water plans have treatments to address some of the impacts. I found an article from 2012 where they specifically talk about cost of addressing the contraceptive pill's impact on British water systems.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jun/02/water-sy...

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

But how could such treatments work? The drugs are a wide range of organic chemicals mixed in with the literal crap of sludge, which is also a wide range of organic chemicals. Just how is this supposed to separate out or degrade the drug residues without also destroying the sludge?

Citizen8396• 2 years ago

PFAS have exceptional properties that make them difficult to degrade, especially when it has been ingested. As a result, exposure to them will lead to bioaccumulation. Wastewater is treated to remove things like metformin, and anything that eludes that can be metabolized normally.

pfdietz3• 2 years ago

WWTPs have not proven successful at removing metformin or its metabolite.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221334372...

Granted, this particular chemical partitions into water, not the solids, so it isn't the best example here.

486sx332• 2 years ago

Artificial estrogen comes to mind as well

jkic474• 2 years ago

I spent 7 years getting rid of the PFOA-derived chemical across all our product lines. they are super useful, but they cross the placental barrier and have a half-life of 6.5 years or so. They were replaced by not-PFOA chemicals that had similar chemical properties so not sure that it did a whole lot of good in the long run.

isoprophlex2• 2 years ago

What chemicals are these replacements, if you can divulge that?

jkic474• 2 years ago

The manufacturers would not disclose it to us beyond it was "not-PFOA", but they did agree to disclose it to the FDA upon request.

The application requires a small, inert molecule, which PFOA was, in spades. They simply made a slightly different small molecule that was almost as inert.

Small is a problem because it becomes mobile. Inert is a problem because it doesn't easily break down. Now, instead of having one "forever chemical" we have a host of them in the environment.

Not sure what the right answer is and whether we are actually better off as a result of all that work.

OutOfHere4• 2 years ago

You wasted seven years getting rid of PFOA when you should have been getting rid of all PFAS, not just one. You are right - it did no good at all.

jkic474• 2 years ago

How cute.

PFOA was the only chemical in that class that was in use in our products. <facepalm>

zug_zug• 2 years ago

Great, since the FDA won't do anything I can't for the day that whole foods to start selling non-PFA grade food.

NFVLCP2• 2 years ago

For the record, we're already dumping hundreds of millions of kilos of poison on our food in the form of glyphosate and other pesticides, albeit not PFAS. Whereas the shock here is that we're already so full of poisons that our own sewage is untenable for use as fertilizer.

rapjr92• 2 years ago

PFAS is added to many pesticides:

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/2023/06/maine...

and to some herbicides:

https://pfasproject.com/2021/03/05/pfas-in-pesticides-a-prob...

OutOfHere4• 2 years ago

Given the absence of effective biosolids/pesticides regulation by the FDA/EPA/USDA, with PFAS levels increasing in soil, the US will become unable to grow food that isn't poison.

whatindaheck• 2 years ago

… we're already so full of poisons that our own sewage is untenable…

Do you have a reference? This sounds terribly fascinating.

lantry• 2 years ago

it's literally what TFA is about. read the first paragraph at least

rapjr92• 2 years ago

So this has been going on for more than half a century now. Wisconsin started using Milorganite in 1926:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milorganite

"Since its inception, over four million metric tons of Milorganite have been sold"

Teflon was trademarked in 1945:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene

Everything alive has likely been poisoned, including children and pets. Certain diseases have been on the rise for a long time, this might be part of the explanation for why. It sounds like the solution will be to stop manufacturing PFOS and related chemicals until there is a scalable way to destroy it and then control its use and destruction, find a way to get it out of people, and probably dilute it where it is found in the environment (it is not possible to chemically process 1/5 of all the soil on agricultural lands. Is it in water tables?) Then hope what remains doesn't do too much damage. Milorganite is only sold in the US so perhaps only the US is contaminated, though I'd suspect the EU may have adopted similar practices. Possibly the US will have to outsource a lot of food production for a long time, though a lot is already outsourced.

toomuchtodo2• 2 years ago

estimates from the Environmental Working Group suggest these harmful chemicals could be polluting nearly 20 million acres of cropland, more than 20% of all U.S. farmland.

At least in Maine, they are siting solar on contaminated farmland in order to eek some use out of contaminated land that cannot be used for agriculture within the next 30 years.

https://www.ecos.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/PFAS-in-Bios... ("PFAS in Biosolids: A Review of State Efforts & Opportunities for Action")

OutOfHere4• 2 years ago

Why do they think that thirty years will be sufficient? PFAS won't degrade in the environment for centuries to over ten thousand years. Various remediation techniques exist, but they can require growing something on the land to slowly take up the PFAS, and this is not compatible with using the land as a solar farm. In practical terms, without prolonged remediation, the land is finished for agricultural use. At some point, they sure will try to regrow and sell PFAS-poisoned food though to unwary consumers.

_heimdall• 2 years ago

Joel Salatin's Beyond Labels podcast had a good episode talking about this a few months ago. I can't find a good URL, their site is focused on paid subscriptions, but it was episode #145 from June 13th.

Its pretty amazing what regulators meant to protect the public allow in and on our food, even with labels like "organic."

OutOfHere4• 2 years ago

Biosolids should be completely banned for agricultural use. They will never be safe to use. It is literally just dried sewage. Use it once and the land is contaminated for ten thousand years.

There is a right way to do it though, which is to compost what's compostable, grow good soil using it, then test it thoroughly for PFAS, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, etc., and only then consider using it if all tests pass. Each batch has to be tested.

Something's Poisoning America's Farms. Scientists Fear 'Forever' Chemicals

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